X570 Crossfire VIII Dark Hero and Hyper M.2 Build Questions

[ctwilson77]

Working on my first computer build in a very long time and am trying to figure out if I can successfully build/configure it the way I want before the parts become available and I spend money. I would appreciate any insight on whether this is doable. I tried reaching out to ASUS tech support with no luck. I do not intend to use it for gaming or overclocking.

Parts List:

ASUS X570 Crossfire VIII Dark Hero Motherboard
AMD Ryzen 9 X5900 CPU
Noctua NH-D15 cooler
32 GB (2x16) DDR4-3200 Memory @ CL16
ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 Gen 4 Card
2 x 0.5 TB Western Digital SN850 M.2 drives installed in the Hyper M.2 card
2 x 2 TB Western Digital SN850 M.2 drives installed in the Hyper M.2 card
GeForce GT 1030 PCIe 3.0 x16 video card
Antec HCG850 power supply

My questions/concerns:

1. Can I install the ASUS Hyper M.2 card, with the four Western Digital SN850’s, in PCIEX16_1 slot with 4 x4 bifurcation and get it to run on PCIe 4.0? The MB manual on page 1-9 implies yes but only at PCIe 3.0 for this CPU (maybe a typo?). I understand that I will have to leave slot PCIEX16_2 empty for PCIEX16_1 to get all 16 PCIe lanes.

2. I want to configure the drives as a 0.5 TB RAID 1 mirror and a 2 TB RAID 1 mirror. Is this configuration supported by the MB and the Hyper M.2 card? I understand that RAID 1 will come with a performance hit but I’d rather have redundancy to reduce potential downtime due to failure. Data will still be backed up externally.

3. Can I boot off of one of the RAID 1 mirrors?

4. In order to support the Hyper M.2 card in slot PCIEX16_1 with PCIEX16_2 empty, I will have to install my video card in chipset slot PCIEX16_3. I believe the video card only requires 4 PCIe lanes. I am not worried about GPU performance as I won’t be using it for games. I’d rather have my storage on the CPU lanes than my GPU. Will the video card work in PCIEX16_3?

The X570 Crosshair VIII Dark Hero isn’t listed in https://www.asus.com/us/support/FAQ/1037507/ and I haven’t been able to find any other useful info.

Any guidance / info / confirmation is much appreciated!

[Murph_9000]

Sure, you can do 4 M.2 drives on the Hyper M.2 card in PCIEX16_1, but you then must leave PCIEX16_2 empty.  Your GPU would have to go in PCIEX16_3, running via the chipset with just x4 bandwidth that is shared with all other devices on the chipset.  That's quite likely to limit the performance of a 3080 Ti in many workloads.  If you are ok with a bandwidth-limited GPU, you can have a x16 storage solution.

None of the desktop platforms are really suitable for running with both high GPU performance and high PCIe storage performance at the same time.  They are designed to give you either x16 + x4, or x8 + x8 + x4, more or less, in terms of CPU PCIe lanes (AM5 adds an extra x4 to that; while LGA1700 adds those to the chipset link).  You can have high GPU, low storage; or high storage, low GPU.  That's for all of AM4 & AM5 and Intel LGA1200 & LGA1700.  You need to go up to Threadripper or Xeon workstation platforms to get the PCIe lanes (including the now quite old Intel Core-X X299 HEDT platform, which was Xeon sold as Core), or EPYC or Xeon server platforms.

I don't know your specific application, but I suggest considering something like an ASUSTOR NAS connected by 10G Ethernet for the capacity, and a smaller amount of NVMe storage for your active datasets.  That's if you need to find a way to get high GPU performance, and high capacity storage.  Also, don't ignore those SATA connectors, a RAID 0 or RAID 10 of 4 SATA SSDs can still deliver some useful local storage that's fast but not quite as fast as NVMe.